CD Reviews

Nonesuch (2012) Ry Cooder's spur-of-the-moment (or is it heat-of-the-moment?) political album opens like any good political album should, with a rollicking blues song told from the point of view of Mitt Romney's dog.

Sub Pop (2012) On their debut full-length Instinct, these electro-pop Swedes strike a delicate balance between trance-y hooks and artful, world music weirdness — and the results typically sound like Cyndi Lauper covering Fleetwood Mac, as produced by Kate Bush.

Merge (2012) It's difficult to imagine that Redd Kross once boasted a sound so hard-charging that punkers were crestfallen when the band traded it in for the poppier style that made up 1987's Neurotica, an LP time has let slip through cracks filled by Sonic Youth and the Pixies.

Yep Roc (2012) With a charismatic frontman like Jim Heath, whose inimitable voice sounds as if it has been soaking in a vat of whiskey, it's not hard to believe the Rev has been going strong for more than two decades.

Relapse (2012) Saying that Baroness have strayed from metal orthodoxy with this, their third long-player, is to betray an ignorance of the sound and evolution of this Savannah foursome, who since 2003 have been wringing out more and more sheer beauty from a bedrock of sonic sludge.

Napalm If this is truly, certainly, most definitely the final Candlemass album (the doom-metal progenitors called it quits in both 1994 and 2002, only to reform both times), then the swan song on their swan-song release is "Black as Time," a middling, excessively lengthy number.

Century Media (2012) The end is nigh, and it will be ugly. With Silencing Machine, Nachtmystium's sixth album, Blake Judd and his fellow Chicago-based melodic black metallurgists have put together a fantastically tormented document — a recipe for Armageddon that promises things getting darkest before the death.

Def Jam (2012) Since the ’80s, when R&B began to lean more heavily on the candid bling-and-booty-centric tropes championed by its plain-speaking hip-hop cousins, the music’s subtlety, nuance, and imagination have faded.